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Review - The Time Traveler's Wife
Nov. 18th, 2008 11:54 pmI always meant to read The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, and I'm quite glad I finally got round to it. It'd be a quite ordinary love story, really, if it weren't for the fact that the lovers meet when he is thirty-six and she is six, and marry when he is thirty and she is twenty-two. If you take the idea of Henry's genetic clock resetting and thereby pulling him into different times too seriously, then this book will probably just seem absurd. As will, probably, the stuff about the time paradox and free will vs. determinism and so on. It's not particularly heavy on the necessary science or philosophy to make this, say, a believable science fiction book.
If you lay that aside and concentrate on the emotional part of the book, it's quite lovely. The idea of living your life all out of order sounds interesting, and scary, and sometimes very hurtful -- and this book gets it right. There's humour, mostly brought by the fact that whenever Henry relocates in time, he ends up stark naked, wherever he ends up. But there's also a lot of pain -- the anxiety about him disappearing during their wedding, the attempts to have a baby, the anxiety about him not being at the hospital... the fact that he dies long before she does, and then she waits for him as an old woman. Parts of it are very real, emotionally, despite the unbelievable premise.
Sometimes, technically, the transitions are a little awkward. I think it's a very ambitious kind of book to write, though, and it's hard to say how it could be better done. I did feel that sometimes I couldn't quite tell who was speaking when, and I did have to refer to the section headings a lot, but once I'd been reading solidly for a while I slipped into it quite well. It takes a little getting used to, then it stops being jarring.
I loved the fact that when I opened the look to start reading, one of my favourite poems was there next to the beginning of the text, Love After Love, by Derek Walcott. I also liked the part from the Odyssey -- very appropriate, in a certain sense.
If you lay that aside and concentrate on the emotional part of the book, it's quite lovely. The idea of living your life all out of order sounds interesting, and scary, and sometimes very hurtful -- and this book gets it right. There's humour, mostly brought by the fact that whenever Henry relocates in time, he ends up stark naked, wherever he ends up. But there's also a lot of pain -- the anxiety about him disappearing during their wedding, the attempts to have a baby, the anxiety about him not being at the hospital... the fact that he dies long before she does, and then she waits for him as an old woman. Parts of it are very real, emotionally, despite the unbelievable premise.
Sometimes, technically, the transitions are a little awkward. I think it's a very ambitious kind of book to write, though, and it's hard to say how it could be better done. I did feel that sometimes I couldn't quite tell who was speaking when, and I did have to refer to the section headings a lot, but once I'd been reading solidly for a while I slipped into it quite well. It takes a little getting used to, then it stops being jarring.
I loved the fact that when I opened the look to start reading, one of my favourite poems was there next to the beginning of the text, Love After Love, by Derek Walcott. I also liked the part from the Odyssey -- very appropriate, in a certain sense.
